I am confused as to the general purport of the last 5 lines, but my current translation reads:"And we conceal these things secretly with great industry, When we ourselves destroy our wealth and ourselves,so that neither our parents nor relatives may in some way perceive it;If we should have made which ones, when we conceal these things, accomplices,who may temper our age at the right time,whence there may be in the end property for our heirs,I would have made it so that there would be more of pimps and not whores and that there would be less of abominable men than there now are.

Can anyone explicate to me where I have gone wrong in my translation? Unfortunately I have not been able to locate a serviceable commentary on this play.

and we ourselves take great pains to secretly conceal these things when we lose our property, our credit [not faith, in the context] and our very selves [/our perspectives, perhaps],lest any parent or relative should realize;if, instead of concealing things, we had confided in those who would curb our generation in a timely fashion [/before it's too late]whereby we may pass on what we inherited to our heirs,I would have brought it about that there were no more pimps or prostitutesand fewer men who were spendthrifts than there are nowadays.

Last edited by adrianus on Sun Aug 02, 2009 11:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Your translation makes better sense than mine, but I've never seen "quom" used in the sense of "instead of" before. My other problem concerns your translation " no more pimps or prostitutes." I agree that the negative "nec" should go with both, but how can you understand it before "lenonum"? Shouldn't the construction be "nec lenonum nec scortorum"?

I imagined that because "nec" is so strong as "nor", the first "nec" could be understood in street Latin because obviously necessary, "[nec] lenonum nec scortorum". [Even in older spoken English putting the verb at the end (it won't be said at the start) I could imagine "apples nor pears I like" instead of longer-winded "neither apples nor pears I like".] Maybe that's wrong. Justification after the fact. Tam vehemens atque conceptum "nec" ut adverbium, primum in sententiâ vulgò omisisse credi ut compressiùs loquaris. Fortassè erro. Argumentum ex post facto.

Scholl (Divinationes in Plauti Truculentum, 1876, p.61, http://www.archive.org/details/4737841) points out that, for "plus est", most prefer the alternatives "posthac minus" and "multo minus", and he says it is not faxim but faxim' for faximus, which seems very likely.

yeah,I don't see how, even with a gap in the text, plus could work at all. I thought the shift from first person plural to singular was odd; that emendation seems necessary. It's just difficult to disagree with Lindsay in light of his authority on the subject.

Well, Lindsay posits "faxim lenonum nec scortorum plus siet," which does make sense and is less invasive than the other emendations; however, the other readings do seem to me to make better sense, and "faxim`" is not much of a stretch.